And another one - this was yesterday lunchtime, necessitating a fairly long lunch since it was at the Town Hall and in any case ran for over an hour, I think (not that I was complaining what with the sunshine and the Friday afternoon-ness of it all).
I think that Shameem's background was originally in sociology but she obviously has a strong background in law, too, and most relevantly is Director of the Fiji Human Rights Commission and has previously been appointed to various substantial roles within the UN. Her lecture had a strong focus on the relationship between Australia and (other) South Pacific nations, drawing on recent goings-on involving the Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste, and I liked the way that she wasn't afraid to make suggestions about some useful ways forward on Australia's - and Australians' - end.
It was interesting to hear about the strong negative response to the notion of 'human rights' which apparently prevails throughout the South Pacific - the concept being associated with the usual raft of western liberal democratic individualist ideology. I've read and even written about this stuff in the past, but somehow it feels more 'real' when said by someone who actually has a background in the area and has seen it first hand. Shameem's solution - or, at any rate, suggestion for the beginning of a solution - seems primarily to involve attempting to move to a genuine conversation (rather than the current talking at cross-purposes that characterises cross-cultural 'engagement'), which is pretty much what everyone who's ever thought seriously about this issue seems to arrive at, but I don't think it should be dismissed for that reason.
She spoke a bit about a sociological (I think) framework called 'symbolic interactionism' or something similar which she thought could productively be applied to the problem of generating a 'human rights culture' in areas like the South Pacific, the idea seemingly being that certain concepts - symbols - could form a common ground between states with greatly divergent underlying social and governmental structures and traditions (eg, Australia and other states in the region), allowing the development of a space within which ideas traditionally associated with concepts such as 'human rights' can be negotiated and shared.
She was particularly keen on 'justice' in this connexion, 'human rights' having evidently been tarred by a certain brush already in the region - to which the obvious retort is that ideas of justice are themselves culturally specific. Perhaps she would have in turn replied that what is important is that the shared symbol initially exist as a matter of form, which at least leaves open the possibility of a genuine conversation - which would then bring us back to the 'well, how do we achieve that in practice?' question, of course, but maybe at this stage it's all about just trying to move in the right direction, and naturally I intuitively share her belief in the importance and power of symbols...
